Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In June 2017, someone reported to the media that there were major problems with the listing of 4399.

The report, titled "in the name of Leek," focuses on 4399 IPO, which conceals a number of corporate matters, the company's development is not as healthy as expected, and there have been major changes in shareholders and controllers.

In response, the whistleblower Cai Wensheng responded quickly: I quit management in 2013, none of my business.

The pictures of the online press conference in 2013 and 2017 are the two extremes in the history of 4399.

The previous point, 4399 is the king of domestic page games. He is the first in the number of visits to the game website in the same field. With the chaotic struggle among the factions of the company, "Equity Gate" and "BMW Policy" were born in this period.

The latter point is the darkest hour of 4399. He failed to go public twice, was reported and sued, and all the game manufacturers in China denounced him for plagiarism.

To make matters worse, just a month after the incident was reported, Adobe officially abandoned Flash.

Flash Mini Game lost its future.

At this time, no one thought that 4399 would still be able to turn around, and the next appearance would be in South Korea, where the best game list will be played.

Today let's talk about 4399, which is one of the earliest game companies on the Internet in China. It has experienced the development of page games, the rise of mobile devices, and now domestic games are fully out to sea. It can be said that his experience is a microcosm of the development of the Internet in China, and everything about him has to be told by an Internet administrator in a roadside Internet bar in Xingning City, Guangdong Province.

1. The best network manager in history worked as a network manager in 1999. In addition to being able to shoot machines, change mice and make instant noodles, another very important job is to tell customers how to surf the Internet.

Before the millennium, the vast majority of Chinese netizens were still in the stage of exploring the Internet and did not have strong autonomy. And at that time, all kinds of supporting infrastructure of the Internet had not kept up, not even Baidu.

The web address has to be lost on its own. After the network administrator wrote down the URL they wanted and copied it to them, they would take the trouble to ask: well, where am I going to lose?

There is a network manager named Li Xingping in Xingning City, Guangdong Province, who is somewhat annoyed. At that time, as the only top student in the Internet bar who had studied for a junior high school degree, he was preparing to make further efforts to teach himself programming, and thought that this matter delayed his learning and progress a little.

So I groped and made a very simple and rough website. There is only one content on the website, that is, small advertisements from other websites. It is said that at that time, Li Xingping used this website to help his own Internet bar bring down the Internet bar next door, and was rewarded by the boss for 1000 yuan.

The site later had a louder name for the Chinese Internet, called hao123.

Where there is demand, there will be a market, and the frequent demand of Internet bar customers represents the real needs of the vast majority of Internet users in the early days of the Internet in China.

Hao123 is developing rapidly. This growth rate is also reflected in Li Xingping's personal income. Every day, his mailbox is filled with emails from various webmasters, hoping to hang his own website on his navigation website.

This brings him an income of 500,000 to 100,000 a month as a network administrator, which is 500,000 to 100,000 in the millennium.

On the other hand, if you can visit the website of hao123, you will get more profit.

The most classic case comes from Sohu. At that time, it was very hard for Li Xingping to maintain such a large website. Sohu offered to help him solve some technical problems, but asked to put Sohu News in front of Sina News.

Li Xingping agreed. The next day, Sohu's reading volume tripled.

The value of hao123 drainage is further demonstrated through this case, and more people offer olive branches of cooperation or acquisition to Li Xingping, including Li Xingping's first dignitary, Yanhong Li, who is also surnamed Li.

At this time, Baidu is worried about something. Baidu is preparing to launch in the United States in 2004, but experts estimate that the smooth interest rate is not high. He needs to prepare a killer mace for himself. The navigation site hao123 and the search engine Baidu are undoubtedly a perfect match.

Robin Li personally found Li Xingping and said two main points to him: first, the website will only get bigger and bigger in the future. How long can you maintain it alone? Second, I will not only give you money, I will also give you the original stock of Baidu. Any major decision adjustments made by hao123 will listen to your opinions.

There were a lot of people looking for Li Xingping at that time, but almost all of them missed the point. At that time, Li Xingping's thought was still from the point of view of a programmer who had created a good product, and he had a special feeling for his own product like a father and a child, hoping to accompany it and watch it develop well. And according to hao123's advertising revenue at that time, Robin Li's asking price is not low.

So in 2004, hao123 was acquired by Baidu for 5000 million yuan and 40,000 shares. That year, Li Xingping was 25 years old, and he became a multimillionaire.

"Oh, boring" but I would like to say that Robin Li is a dignitary of Li Xingping, and I do not mean this sum of money. But right away, he is going to tell Li Xingping an important truth:

"I can only make products, and I will be a wage earner all my life."

two。 Why 4399? After the acquisition of hao123, Baidu's user data and business value have entered a period of rapid blowout. Some people have converted that even excluding user growth, hao123 can generate 400 million yuan in revenue for Baidu every year.

A year after the acquisition, Baidu successfully went public in 2005.

Compared with the returnee elite like Robin Li, Li Xingping really doesn't understand business, but he knows more about users. Because he is also a computer novice, he knows more about the simple and extremely simple needs of millions of early Chinese netizens. Around these needs, he started a second business.

Desktop decoration website 8825, music player 7789, ip query website ip138, a number of URLs to address the most basic needs of Chinese netizens have been set up. But the one with the best development is 4399.

The original design idea of 4399 is almost the same as that of hao123, which is to collect all Mini Game on the market and make a Mini Game navigation URL.

At that time, the domestic Internet had just started, and the configuration of personal computers was generally not high. Coupled with the popularity of Internet addiction, parents are hostile to large-scale online games and stand-alone games, so it is absolutely impossible to install games.

Li Xingping had an insight into the special requirements of players for the game in this special period, and collected a number of extremely fast web pages Mini Game that do not need to be installed on 4399.

Once it was launched, it was widely praised by many netizens, but the crisis also came quietly. Among all the products Li Xingping has made so far, there is a fatal problem-- there is no moat.

To put it bluntly, he just built a website, stuffed it with other URLs, games, music, desktop, ip and so on. There is no technical content at all.

Before doing hao123, because the creation time is too early, it is ahead of other imitators and grabs the user's mind. Navigation sites are almost the same, one is enough, many can not remember.

But Mini Game sites are different, when domestic Internet entrepreneurs have matured. With projects with large traffic and easy to start, they did not hesitate to launch a sneak attack on Li Xingping, an Internet veteran comrade.

7k7k Mini Game in 2003, 2144 Mini Game in 2006. They regard Li Xingping, the "first stationmaster of China" as their idol, and their only goal is to kill the idol.

Li Xingping is also very different from the past at this time. Relying on hao123, you can get more than one million traffic support every day. His staff also spent money to build a team to build core competitiveness. According to the time Finance report, 4399 has a professional team to crack genuine games. Foreign game companies will release it on the same day and will be moved to 4399 the next day.

Of course, there is no copyright. Foreign companies don't even know that there is such a game website in China that gives them all to one pot. Even if you know, it doesn't matter. At that time, China's paid game market had not yet taken shape, and there was nothing to speak of. Some game manufacturers, who are even happy to see this, have the right to borrow the pirated education market to promote their brands.

Rely on whoring traffic and whoring games, 4399 this veteran comrade a move to change hair, other game sites are calling parents.

In June 2011, when Google counted the number of visits to domestic websites, it ranked 14th in 4399 and 1st among similar websites.

3. This is the best era of web games, so far, the development of 4399 is good?

If you only look at the traffic, to see the degree of satisfaction of users for this single demand of Mini Game, it is undoubtedly satisfactory as a product.

But 4399 is a company, and the company depends on revenue. At this time, 4399 is the same as hao123 at that time, the revenue is single, so it will place small advertisements on the website.

And this part of the revenue, according to its 2014 IPO prospectus, 4399 advertising revenue accounted for only 3.35% in 2013, compared with another revenue point developed later, it is almost negligible.

It was only four years ago that Li Yanhong's revenue soared thousands of times, so what can 4399 do now, holding the game in his hand, which is almost the largest pool of traffic on the Chinese Internet?

At that time, World of Warcraft was tested for three years, and countless gamers were infatuated with it, and many game manufacturers followed suit, hoping to make the first Chinese World of Warcraft.

It is hard to say that Li Xingping has not been moved. After all, if he wins, he will be able to achieve all the achievements in life. But fortunately, when he was 4399, he already had a teammate, and even more luckily, this teammate was named Cai Wensheng.

The relationship between Cai Wensheng and Li Xingping is very delicate. Five years ago, they met each other and stabbed each other in the neck, so they were friends by the neck.

When Li Xingping was doing hao123 navigation, Cai Wensheng was the only one who kept up with the pace and could produce a 265 navigation. After Li Xingping sold hao123 to Baidu, he also sold it to Google.

Of course, he has a louder name on the Chinese Internet, "the father of Meitu".

Cai Wensheng on the right and Li Xingping 4399 in the middle is one of Cai Wensheng's early investment projects. The two people who love and kill each other recognize each other's abilities. In 2008, Cai Wensheng invested as chairman of 4399 and brought in an unknown man named Luo Haijian.

Luo Haijian is the younger brother of Cai Wensheng. He has as much equity as Li Xingping and takes 15%. Li Xingping didn't know Luo Haijian and didn't know what he was doing here, but since Cai Wensheng paid the money, he didn't say much.

Many years later, he felt deeply grateful that he had not offended the ruthless Luo Haijian.

Two professional teammates began to give Li Xingping an analysis: "Ping, you see, there are many people who come to us to play games, but they are basically people who can only play web pages and like to play web pages." it is different from the people who play online games. It is recommended to follow the three principles of 4399 "not stuck, not slow, continuous" to do some simple page games. "

But Li Xingping's attitude is very resolute, he knows very well: "without money, you can earn more, if the ideal is gone, you will earn more money."

The three quickly reached a unified understanding and stepped up their efforts, and in half a year they rammed up a "Hot Blood three Kingdoms" with a monthly income of NT $500000; a year later, "Divine and Devil cover the Sky," with a monthly running water of NT $20 million.

4399 began the transformation of the page gaming platform. In 2008, Wang Haibing, founder of the Taomi game, found 4399 with the independently developed Moore Manor. "Moore Manor", "Sail" and "Kung Fu School" began to take turns.

In 2011, the net profit of 4399 exceeded 100 million. In 2012, 4399 revenue exceeded 1 billion.

Then everything stopped and came to the magical 2013.

4. My Lord, times have changed in 2013, and 4399 ushered in its biggest enemy in the course of its development-smartphones.

Due to the popularity of smartphones, mobile games experienced an unprecedented blowout this year, with the market size reaching 9.24 billion, an increase of 371.4% compared with the same period last year.

4399 also suffered an unprecedented malaise, with steady traffic from 400th in the world to collapse in excess of 1000.

Of course, this is something that will not be realized until the end of 2013. At the beginning of 2013, it was still the best time in 4399, with the first place in the field of page games and four times the performance of Tencent, which ranked second.

As a result, 4399 of leaders, prepared in advance in 2013, are busy (carefully worded) in the rational allocation of resources and the optimization of personnel adjustments. Among the relatively famous events that were born: a sum of money was reported missing, and a technology bull was tricked into leaving without telling.

We won't go into details here, because none of these are important. The important thing is that when all the dust settles, Cai Wensheng chooses to escape the core management circle. Li Xingping, as the founder, is just a founder and becomes the spiritual leader. 4399 officially entered the era of Luo Haijian.

As soon as he came to the stage, a younger brother jumped on him, hugged his leg and shouted, "my Lord, times have changed."

From the beginning of this cry, Luo Haijian will gradually realize the fact that he did not come to 4399 as a leader, he came to 4399 to go to prison, and five or six years of crucifixion is about to begin. This has nothing to do with Luo Haijian's personal ability, only to blame the times are changing too fast, in 2013, a daze, and then want to catch up, it is more difficult.

At that time, the pattern of the video game market was like this. Mobile games aim at page games and Mini Game for learning transcendence, because at that time the mobile phone configuration is not high, and complex games can not be transplanted; page games are desperately grasping PC games to do learning transcendence from birth to the end of page games. In front of all the learning surpassing, what about the PC games? what did they do? Take Tencent and NetEase as an example, they have all gone to play mobile games.

So, close the loop, family.

But there is a problem here, with the development of mobile phones and computer hardware, mobile games and PC games still have long-term room to rise, but the page games sandwiched in the middle have no room for decline.

In 2012, page games still accounted for more than 30% of the market share of online games, but by 2013, page games fell to less than 20%, the same as mobile games that have just been fully developed for a year.

The title of 4399, the king of page games, is of little value.

4399 to make a transformation, but the transformation must cost money. This money plan is divided into two steps: first, go public, find stock investors to borrow some; second, the enhanced version of learning beyond, borrow some from players of other games.

In fact, it is no secret that page game companies love to learn in the industry, because companies that do not like learning are dead, belonging to the genetic lack of innovation factors.

At that time, the only material designated for study in the industry was "Legend," which belonged to everyone who was learning, and 4399 was convinced that horses without night grass were not fat, and everyone dared to learn, and learned new fields and new heights.

Horizontal version of arcade fighting games, he learned

Fighting Hunter's "DNF" round-based MMORPG game, he learned

"Fairy language" and "Fantasy Journey to the West" MOBA competitive games, he learned

"League of Legends" of the Genesis Alliance, many people fight to break through the variety game, he learns

The first-person shooting game of "Sugar Bean Man" in the Battle of Sugar Bean, he learned

Gunfight Hero's "CF" first-person shooter games with added skills, he also learned

"Hero shootout" 's "Watch Pioneer" said by the way that 17 years after the game was reported to have been forcibly removed from Apple's shelves, when the filth was reincarnated, there happened to be a gunfight-themed game in the country, so there was a "heroic shootout" reborn as "Jedi shootout".

It can be said that a 4399 store, half of the history of Chinese online games.

In 2014, 4399 submitted the IPO prospectus on the domestic gem. There was no accident that he failed. In 2017, he came back again and successfully sent a double kill.

Then came the opening scene when two investors reported that they had concealed important matters in their prospectus and tried to fraudulently issue the offering. The Beijing News followed up and said, ah, they are right, this data is not quite correct.

The first party of the money plan was basically declared a failure.

At this time, the second party action team should also send a congratulatory message: Ah, our side has achieved gratifying results. Under our in-depth implementation and conscientious implementation, our study plan was unanimously approved by our surrounding competitors, and they all sent us prosecutions.

23 copyright lawsuits, including but not limited to Tencent, NetEase, Duoyi Network, Shanda and Blizzard.

At the moment, the autumn wind is bleak, silent, 4399 trapped on the top of the light.

Looking left and right, waiting for a young hero, I only heard another bad news. The 4399 Flash plug-in, which depends for a living, was officially abandoned by Adobe in 2017.

The news was tantamount to asking him not to wait. Zhang Wuji led six relatives to flatten the top of the light.

Of course, for an enterprise, as long as the cash flow continues, the sad days will always pass. As a result, 4399, who were not killed in 2017, finally ushered in a better life than death experience in 2018-the suspension of the game version.

From the perspective of the situation, even if the game version number begins to resume review, the release of the game version number will continue to be strict in the future. As a result, many small game manufacturers fell in 2018, but the national policy is not to crack down on the domestic game industry, but to curb low-quality skinning games through version number restrictions, while allowing domestic games to go out for cultural export.

"if you want my treasure, come and get it! they are at the end of the great voyage. I have all the policies ready."

On the one hand, there are restrictions on the distribution of version numbers and stricter protection for minors; on the other hand, we encourage people to go to sea and give preferential treatment to all kinds of benefits. In addition, the domestic game market has indeed been carved up by Tencent and NetEase. So starting from 2018, domestic game manufacturers have started a vigorous era of going out to sea.

But is there a chance for the 4399, which has lost its Flash tools and is known for its skinning and relatively low R & D capabilities?

5. Two years after the unexpected turnaround, App Anine released the ranking of Chinese game makers in the third quarter of 2020 in the offshore revenue of Action RPG. The Sword of Miracle, released in 4399, ranked first, beating Tencent and Mihayou.

In September of the same year, the new work "Starry Tale" ranked 17th on the best-selling list in South Korea, and continued to sweep the belly of the Korean game market with the perennial top five "Sword of Miracles".

In April of the same year, the new tour "Legend of Magic Sword" and "Miracle Sword" were released in Japan. In the month of their launch, they both ranked in the top 40 of Japan's iOS bestseller list, driving the overall revenue of overseas business up 40% from the previous month.

According to media estimates, 4399 has reached billions of dollars overseas.

And at the end of 2021, with SLG's new work to counter-attack the mainland, this work has become a dark horse in China's recent SLG mobile games, advertising everywhere, many people should have brushed it. The game is called Civilization and Conquest.

The secret of the 4399 turnaround was hidden eight years ago.

In the more than 20-year history of the common take-off of China's Internet and game industry, there have been numerous cases of success or failure, and the discussion around these cases will eventually return to the speculation of the two viewpoints.

When playing games, should we do the logic of content or follow the product logic of the Internet?

It is good to do the content. The game itself is a combination of audio-visual interaction. Each item contains the design of the content, the script and picture of the film texture, the right music, and the way of play firmly attracts you at the same time. It also allows you to have a deeper interaction with the content and have a deeper feeling.

Even in the past few years, I can remember clearly that when I was in primary school, one day it snowed heavily in winter and the school suspended classes for half a day. My cat is playing Chinese Paladin in the bedroom alone, and my parents are watching TV in the living room. The heating in the house was on well, and goose feathers fluttered outside. I walked in the Monster Lock Tower to save Zhao Linger. After playing for a whole afternoon, when my mother asked me to have dinner, the Monster Lock Tower just collapsed. After watching the animation, I felt a sense of loss.

This is the game experience that every gamer wants to pursue, but not everyone can have the conditional experience.

For example, I am already a middle-aged office worker with a lot of work pressure and little and broken rest time. I also have game needs, so what kind of game will be suitable for me?

This is the logic of making a product. How to touch my clients, what their user portraits are, what they need around this portrait, why they come to me, and how I should solve the problem for him.

4399 chose the latter.

4399 is not indifferent to the popularity of mobile in 2014, they launched an App, called 4399 Box, an App Store perpendicular to the game field, in an attempt to use channels to seize some of the voice in the mobile game market.

4399 has made great efforts to drain this product, but the results appear to be lukewarm years, three years, the number of daily active users reached 1 million.

Compared with many popular mobile games, this result is actually nothing. But it pointed out the direction for 4399, in this game market, they collected a large amount of real data and needs of players.

Which players' problems have not been solved? What kind of game do they need?

The feedback was concentrated within 4399 and was shared by Chairman Luo Haijian at the annual meeting of the game industry in 2017-"Seven elements of 3DMMO Game Development."

And finally guided 4399, completed the research and development of the classic 3DMMO work "Miracle Sword" of Japan and South Korea.

At this point, you must wonder what kind of game is the "Miracle Sword" that makes South Koreans krypton and krypton crazy by the light of this national tour.

In fact, it is also available on domestic Taptap, with a score of 2.2.

Even if you have not played, you are actually very familiar with this game, say a few key words to make you feel: off-line automatic hang-up, first charge welfare gift bag, game props can be recycled, open a new suit every few days.

Even South Korean spokesmen are looking for Su Jisub, a star who is also forty or fifty years old and recalled by a generation.

Eighteen years ago, Li Xingping had an insight into the special needs of domestic players in the early days of the Internet and made Mini Game, which has no threshold by comparison. Today, the 4399 no longer needs Mini Game, while South Korea still needs the legend of hanging up on the phone.

From the budding of Chinese games to the domination of South Korean games, the concept of creating games in 4399 may never have changed:

"screw the 3A masterpiece, it's my brother, come and cut me."

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: leek Huang A rich (ID:jiuhuangArich), author: a rich

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